Best of Peter Rhodes - May 2
Here's a selection of the best of the Peter Rhodes column taken from the Express & Star for the week ending May 2.
Here's a selection of the best of the Peter Rhodes column taken from the Express & Star for the week ending May 2.
LORD Levy says Blair told him Brown was a liar. Blair denies it. Which means one of the three certainly is.
I RECENTLY shared a hotel with four old blokes who would meet for breakfast each morning and reflect on how good life was. They were delighted with the state pension. They heaped fulsome praise on the NHS. They admired the Prime Minister and they believed that young Ed Balls was a first-rate politician on the way up. Above all, this quartet of seventysomethings could not speak highly enough of today's young people who, they agreed, were probably the smartest and most polite generation ever. Only kidding. The four old blokes, of course, bitched and belched their way through the kippers, moaning about everything and anything, as old blokes have done ever since the first caveman slapped a cave-teenager for teasing the brontosaurus. From the dawn of civilisation, if you believe the Gospel According to Old Gits, everything has been getting steadily worse. This week, an ITV survey says Britons are less polite now than they were 10 years ago. And if that question had been asked at any time since about 5,000 BC, the answer would have been exactly the same. Just as it will be 10 years from now. BOYS, according to a rather sniffy old definition, are "noise covered in dirt." Latest research in California and Germany shows that kids raised with dogs and mucking around with other kids in playgroups, are less likely to get leukaemia. Moral: if your little boys (and girls) are not noise covered in dirt, you are doing something wrong.
WHEN girls fall out. Vera Baird, the Solicitor General, has apparently been slapped down by Baroness Scotland, the Attorney General, over her plan for princesses to have the same right as princes to inherit the Crown. The baroness says it is "a complex undertaking," which is Whitehall-speak for batting it into the long grass. Interestingly, the Queen is said to support the idea, which is probably the result of spending the past half-century watching her son and heir immature with age.
YOU have seen them time after time. The families who never talk. At home, they retreat to their own cocoons, kids in the bedrooms, glued to individual TV sets. They go out together, yet not together. Dad's on the mobile. Mum's reading Hello! and the kids are head-down, fiddling with the Nintendo game. A restaurant in the Midlands is bowing to the inevitable, installing mini television screens in every dining booth. It is so sad. Why do so many families never have a conversation? Maybe it's because they didn't get to know each other and it's rude to talk to strangers, innit?
HOW, in this age of expert advisers on everything, can anyone construct a TV drama based on the notions that:
a) It is possible to sever a man's head, and both hands, with a single swipe of a ceremonial cavalry sword
b) A rifle ejects shell cases with such force that they crack a car windscreen
It was not so much Waking the Dead (BBC1) as suffocating the facts.
EVENTS in Scotland make a mockery of that much-loved Whitehall phrase "key workers." These are the workers (all public-sector, of course) on whom the rest of us allegedly depend and who therefore deserve perks such as subsidised housing: firefighters, teachers, nurses and so on. Curiously, oil-refinery workers are not classed as key workers. Yet before the lads had even gone on strike at Grangemouth, the panic-buying had started and some petrol stations were running dry. Sounds pretty damn key to me.
A READER asks if the BBC long-range weather forecast has been taken over by Iraq. Apparently the outlook is partly Sunni but mostly Sh'ite.
SARAH Brown (who?) has written a book on wise advice from the fathers of many celebrities. Gary Lineker, Anna Ford, and Sir Richard Branson obligingly pass on priceless tips from their dads to this previously unknown author. Here's one tip for daughters everywhere. If you'd like to be a published author, marry a prime minister. Ah, that Sarah Brown.
MY FATHER told me: Never believe for all of your life something you're told just once in your life. Mind you, he only told it me the once.
A READER asks: Do dental students have a gap year?
* Has this whetted your appetite for more of Peter's gems? Make sure you read his column every day by picking up a copy of the Express & Star.
